If you have ever tried to book an event location for a company event, you know how stressful a task can be. You have to contact several providers, wait for offers, evaluate them, check whether they receive good business and then all be approved. Therefore, it makes sense for companies to take over the abbreviation to Airbnb or Booking.com depending on the size of the group or work with an agency.
The French startup Naboo tries to bring more visibility into this fragmented market with an Airbnb-like market for corporate retreats, which in addition to accommodation in other services such as catering, activities and bundles of transport.
The company also offers a SaaS component This serves as a platform for all mouse events (short for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions, these are large meetings of people). The platform essentially defines its large corporate customers their procurement guidelines, create approval workflows, manage invoices and payments and much more.
An all-in-one marketplace is likely to help the company sell its platform to large corporate customers. Publicly traded companies are constantly looking for platforms that centralize all expenses in a certain category so that they can determine and see budgets whether they are too much expenses.
The strategy seems to work: Naboo says that booking volumes were quadrupled from € 15 million in the previous year to 60 million euros. This is a marketplace, so the majority of this booking value is recorded by its accommodation and catering partners, but the company announced Techcrunch that it takes an average deposit of 17%-10% -12% of providers. and another 5% -6% of customers. Naboo generated sales of around 10 million euros in 2024.
The company said that 10% of the French public companies listed in the CAC40 index used its platform and 10 contracts that generate more than 1 million euros in booking volume per year. Some of his customers are Google, Société Générale, Veolia, Arkema, Thales and Qonto.
The startup recently cited a round of series A 20 million EUR (around 21 million US dollars), which was cited by the term capital. Remarkably, the round of Serie A only comes 11 months after its Seed round.
With the new money, the startup would like to automate some of the manual tasks that are currently being taken over by the project managers. It has 140 people on his squad, including 20 freelancers.
The company also intends to expand in other countries, starting in Great Britain, where the product already lives. The country already makes 10% of Naboo’s revenue, and apparently things are going well.
